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Over at TaxProf Blog, we learn that 24/7 Wall Street identifies law profs as no. 2 among professions that earn the most for the least amount of work. According to the statistics, law professors work only 1,608 hours per year—for a 50 year week, that’s just over 32 hours per week. According to the study, that’s 400 hours less than the average U.S. employee. As I sit in my office on a Labor Day afternoon, I realize that I’m more of a workaholic than I thought I was. (I’m not the only prof in the building.)

By the way, the #1 job is pilots, copilots, and flight engineers. Judges and magistrates rank #9.

Tax Prof Blog also quotes Paul Campos for these statistics on salaries at these five law schools:

Comments

Are these salaries for tenured professors only? They certainly do not include the salaries for clinical profs, which are well below $100,000 at most law schools despite their higher teaching loads.

Posted by: LLM | Sep 12, 2011 9:25:14 AM

I'd be fascinated to see how the working hours break down if you divide "law professors" into three distinct groups: tenured professors, tenure-track professors who don't yet have tenure, and contract professors. And as tenure slowly spreads among legal writing profs, it would be interesting to compare tenured skills profs with tenured "doctrinal" profs.

Posted by: juris(prudence) | Sep 9, 2011 7:03:37 AM

There is so much wrong with the 24/7 Wall Street report it's difficult to know where to begin. It cherry-picks salaries at schools paying high salaries (e.g., Texas and Michigan are notorious for the very high salaries paid to law faculty, many of whom, at least at one of those schools, aren't on campus much). These outliers ought to be set aside. It calculates hours without taking into account weekend and summer work. The presumption that law faculty do not work during those times is counterfactual, and demonstrates how ignorance is a bad thing. Worse, this report concludes that airline pilots, law professors, speech language pathologists, pyschologists and dental hygienists are the highest paid professionals based on hourly compensation. Clearly this is a flawed report. Where are the professional athletes? Where are the movie stars? Where are the CEOs? Even if one assumes they work 7,000 hours a year and sleep only 3 hours a night, their per-hour compensation exceeds by far the $32 amounts that this absurd study claims for the third, fourth, and fifth place occupations. It's unfortunate that stupidity, ignorance, and incoherent analyses are not illegal.